The Joshua Files - Dark Parallel proofs

I know, the New Year ’round-up’ should refer to the previous year. But I’m exhausted just thinking about it. In general, I’m starting the year tired. “Why do we have New Year?” my Teenage Daughter asked me. “How is it a ‘new beginning’? If you commit a crime on Dec 31st 2010, you’d still be punished in 2011.”

So it is with seasonal illness. If you spend the Christmas/New Year period suffering repeated attacks from viruses and secondary sinus infections, you start the year exhausted.

Lots happened last year and mostly very good, luckily for me. But with a diary that is getting packed out, I’d rather look ahead. So here are my forward-looking highlights of 2011.

1. My sister’s wedding. Little Sister is getting married in Melbourne, Australia, giving me a lovely excuse to visit.
2. First ever visit to school in Europe (outside of UK). Looking forward to meeting the students of College Leman in Geneva!
3. Publication of Joshua Files book 4 – DARK PARALLEL. The photo shows the stack I’ll be sending off today to winners of the New year’s prize draw and to some book bloggers who have expressed special enthusiam for Joshua.
4. A decision about After Joshua, What Next? If you follow this blog you may have heard me refer to Ultra Secret New Project. Well, New Editor has now read the manuscript and given me some pointers about how to improve it. So it won’t be much longer before I find out… (AL Kennedy saved me the bother of writing about what it’s like waiting for an editorial report over Christmas in her blog post Waiting for book ‘go’… Basically – what she said.)
5. Teenage Daughter’s UCAS application is in. Will there be offers? Will she get the grades? Is this the year when my Firstborn Leaves Home?
6. My first London Book Fair. Big trade fairs make me dizzy, as I learned when running an IT business. Without a stand to focus on or a conference speech to make, I get terribly baffled and have to go and lie down. So I’d foresworn never to attend a Book Fair unless invited as a speaker. I’ll be talking alongside Francesca Simon (author of Horrid Henry) about school libraries, in an event run by the School Libraries Association.
7. Book deals! My fingers are tightly crossed for two ridiculously talented friends of mine from very long ago. Sarah Hilary (crime writer) and Christian David (author of a rollicking historical biography-fiction) are both writers who secured literary agents last year. They are now working on edits prior to the big submission process – to editors! I won’t be happy until they are recognized for the huge literary talents that they are.

It’s a particularly lovely set of events. No lurking gremlins as yet. However, I find it easier not to look too far into the future. The plots of my own stories almost always involve calamity striking the minute everything seems to have gone calm. Not that I enjoy such a rollercoaster in my own life. I try to make lemonade when served lemons. Nevertheless, it gets increasingly tiring, all that lemonade-making. That’s what they don’t tell you about getting older. Yes, you get wiser and more experienced, so lots of things are easier. But your energy levels diminish.

No wonder people turn to magic beans and nutrional supplements and exotic exercise regimes. If only all it took was Berocca.

However, I am still aching pleasantly from the weights I did at the gym a few days ago. I will change nothing! Maybe lose a little weight to look good in the Diane Von Furstenberg dresses.

Happy New Year!

If you haven’t seen it yet – here’s the draw for the advance review copies of DARK PARALLEL. Once again I’m assisted by Matt Barnard from Summertown Starbucks.

It's France. But where?

It’s been quite a while since I blogged. Apart from having family and friends visit and move to Oxford, I’ve been busier this summer than I usually am.

Busy with writing and busy with researching!

As I type this I am 74,000 words into Ultra Secret New Project. I haven’t written an uncommisioned novel since Jaguar’s Realm (I’m still holding onto that by the way, in case you’re wondering, haven’t decided when the right time is for Jaguar to hit the world…). I remember blogging about the final stages of writing Jaguar’s Realm and this feels a bit like that.

1. Tiring!

2. Someone had better publish this book after all this effort to write it…

3. Drained.

Usually I do all my research trips before I start writing a novel. In the case of Ultra Secret New Project, however, I visited the two foreign locations during the writing itself.

The first location is shown in this photo. At the bottom of the photo you can also see my two Brazilian friends, Ana and Deborah. Loyal travel companions and veterans of an MG Harris research trip, (they’re mentioned in the dedication of Zero Moment), Ana, Deborah, as well as Ali and Kizzie, once again braved foreign lands to scout a location with me.

But where in the world are we?

Prize for the first correct answer in the comments – a Joshua enamel badge and a signed Invisible City postcard.

Except that, as several readers have already pointed out to me, ZERO MOMENT is now being sold on Amazon.co.uk, Tesco, and Waterstones (in the stores too). Some readers have already bought it, read it and sent me lovely comments – thank you!

(Would be nice if you would put nice comments on Amazon too, that would be RIGHT lovely.)

Meanwhile what does an author do in the run-up period?

1. Plan a ZERO MOMENT launch party. It’s back to Blackwell’s in Oxford, but with more guests and more cakes. I am planning a marathon cupcakes making session, and am choosing four different types to make. Might do a poll, heh heh.

2. Gloatathon! Tracking the progress of Joshua as it starts getting published around the world. The Vietnamese edition of INVISIBLE CITY made their top ten paperback list, according to one blog. Nice reviews are appearing on blogs about the Indonesian and Spanish editions. Lovely, kind bloggers!

ICE SHOCK, which isn’t yet published in the USA, made a Top 12 Young Adult Books of 2009 on a US book blog, Semicolon. (And was also nominated for a Cybil – Middle Grade Fiction Award.)

I have exactly the same attitude to gloating about nice reviews as I once had to good results with my lab experiments. Celebrate them while you can! One day the reviews (or results) will not be so good…

3. Plan the Krispy Kreme FaceBook party. You need to be on the Joshua Files FaceBook Group to come to this, but it would be lovely to see some of the Oxford-based Joshua readers.

4. Meet Lovely Editor to discuss her notes for the manuscript of Joshua #4, DARK PARALLEL. Yes! It’s written and I am now poised, poised I tell you, to move to a second draft.

5. Pitch Quite Secret New Thing (hereafter QSNT) and Top Secret New Thing That I Only Just Thought Of In December But Which Is A Sort Of Major Rewrite Of Jaguar’s Realm (hereafter Top Secret New Thing or TSNT for short). Where am I on this? I have the opening chapters of QSNT which I am rewriting with suggestions from Mr Agent and today I wrote chapter 3 of TSNT.

I don’t know what I will write next! The new MD of Scholastic Children’s Book’s will soon hear both ideas…and decide: which one is best? Or at least, which one is best, next.

So as you see I have been busy. Don’t forget to join the Joshua Files FaceBook Group!

Marple - a passive observer until she's good and ready to stop the killing.

As neglectful of this blog that I’ve been, I hope you’ll forgive me. The usual excuses apply.

In the past few weeks I’ve launched a new website, Mayan Mysteries of 2012 – a Young Person’s Guide, as well as two new trailers, for The Joshua Files series (2010 version) and for Joshua Files 3: ZERO MOMENT.

And very exciting, I’ve been working with the Walker Books for Young Readers (part of Bloomsbury USA) the US publisher of Joshua Files on their version of INVISIBLE CITY.

As well as putting the finishing touches to the proofs of ZERO MOMENT. It’s starting to feel like a pretty full-on job, this author lark. (I’m joking, it always was, now there’s just more pressure.)

But FINALLY I can start to devote some real thought to Quite Secret New Thing.

We have a title, for one thing. I’m not going to tell you the title just now, sorry to be a tease. I feel like it might jinx things, so lets wait until I’ve got going with the writing, n’kay?

Titles often come last, after you’ve written the darn thing at least. (And I have yet to write a SINGLE page of Quite Secret New Thing.) But for some reason I needed to know I had a good title. We (Agent, Editor and I) had been referring to QSNT as (harumph) For Kids where (harumph) is a stupendously famous and successful novel for adults which hasn’t yet been kid-ified.

I’m not going to say what (harumph) is obviously…

The thing is, there is a very sound reason, or seventy, why (harumph) hasn’t yet been kid-ified, in fact the whole project began with me musing whether it could even be done. So for the past year I’ve been thinking about why (harumph) doesn’t work for young readers, what is the essence of (harumph) which makes it exciting and what needs to be done to provide young readers with the equivalent reading experience.

Thinking, however, is one thing.

Writing is another. Ha. Many an idea sounds good until you commit it to paper.

So on Friday I drafted the plot, the plot of Quite Secret New Thing aka (harumph) For Kids aka (censored).

And immediately I saw the first flaw.

The nature of the genre of QSNT is such that the protagonist is thrown into a maelstrom of a very complex, very alien adult world. He does not cause the story to happen; the story happens around him.

Which is Very Not Good. As literary agent Rachelle Gardner reminded her readers recently, the protagaonist must be pro-active.

Or at least, ideally.

Sometimes though, you have to have quite a lot of stuff happening to the protagonist or around the protagonist, before they take action.

Think of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Harry is passive, the things that happen to him happen in spite of what he does or wants to do (being abused by the Dursleys, which he puts up with, being sent to Hogwarts). Until his friend Hermione suggests that they investigate the forbidden corridors of Hogwarts, in true Famous Five fashion, and stumble upon the mystery of the Philosopher’s Stone.

In detective stories, the protagonist, the detective often is a passive observer of events, remaining somewhat outside of the action (crime, generally). Until they engage with the mystery. (I watched a MARPLE show last week, Murder Is Easy, in which Miss Marple merely flashed her gimlet blue eyes at all manner of suspects, murderer and victims, but did not a thing to stop the carnage of murder, until she was good and ready. She did not really alter the trajectory of the story until right at the end.)

But whatever the allowances of the genre, Rachelle Gardner is quite right. The protagonist should be pro-active. It makes for a better story. So even in detective fiction, the author should go back to the plot and make as much of the action happen because of the actions of the protagonist.

It really helps, at this stage, to have written the plot down. Or if you’re a jump-in-and-write type of writer, to have written about 20,000 words.

So I’d better get down to it.

I know that a couple of my friends who read this blog are writers too, so I thought I’d actually write some posts about the process of starting a completely new project.

Over the last year I’ve been mulling over an idea for something completely new that I could work on post Joshua. I know Joshua is only on book 2 but I’m already starting Joshua 4 and planning Joshua 5. For me the major part of the Joshua experience will be over by next year.

So last year I started to ponder a question: could I write a crime novel for children? I wondered why there isn’t a really high profile mainstream crime series for children. I wondered if the genre actually lends itself to children and young adults.

Maybe it doesn’t. There are some big problems after all.

1. Crime is usually motivated by some very adult issues. Things that have little places in the world of children, frankly. So a children’s crime story could be about theft, or something like revenge for a huge injustice. But the best crime stories are about murder…so how do we get around that?
2. The detective figure is not a natural hero. Smarter than everyone around him/her, the detective must see what others cannot, ideally without turning into too much of an arrogant pig. A child detective would have to be that much smarter. And readers don’t empathize easily with preocious children.Writers of adult crime stories get around this by making us sympathize with the detective through their flaws; drunkenness, loneliness (divorced, single parent), utter wierdness, or by making them into such wise genial figures (MIss Marple, Madam Ramotswe) that we cosy up to them.This isn’t easy to do with a teenage detective.

You could probably solve many of these issues by using humour, but that’s been done. What I wanted to know was – what would it take to make the detective novel work for children, without making it about larks, serious yet also thrilling and adventuresome?

I thought about this for some months. I came up with an idea that I thought could work. During my book tour in 2008 I bounced the idea around with a few of the Scholastic staff who accompanied me. They thought it could work too.

More tweaking of the idea, over months, adding elements into it, exactly like a potion. First comes the problem…the need or lack. Then comes the possible solution…a dash of this, a snippet of that. All borrowed from sources where they work. (I never said I didn’t steal and borrow. I do it all the time!)

After almost a year I had something that is about 60% there in terms of structural elements and conscious influences. Like Orson Scott Card advises, the basis is a cross of two ideas, actually, three, although not in equal proportions.

In a coffee shop with my new editor, I discussed the idea. We’d just seen some people we knew as we passed Trinity College, Oxford and our discussion had turned to something relevant to my idea. It was probably the right time to have an expert listen to the idea, because I believe the plot outline and concept had only recently gained coherence.

My editor was most intrigued by the idea. That’s a good sign that it’s worth pursuing further. Mr Agent, of course needed no persuasion. An editor’s interest can’t be argued with…

Well, the first draft at least…typed the final sentence.

The polishing comes next but compared to the original act of writing, that’s easy.

The final scene is set on Jibacoa beach, east of Havana, at sundown as our hero struggles for his last chance to escape…

And that’s all I’m going to say about ‘Jaguar’s Realm’ for quite a while. It’s taken over a year to write, what with one thing and another. I feel quite drained now, actually. Need a good break to get the creative juices going again.

Now to read the ms aloud to my teenage daughter and see if it’s hitting all the right buttons. (I can’t recommend this enough for polishing a ms. You get an immediate audience reaction, and when something doesn’t work you get that puzzled look…Huhhhh?)

2. Oldest daughter invades to fleece me of what little shrapnel I have. “I haven’t got my PIN yet!” is the usual excuse for the ongoing cash drain. Youngest daughter is sleepy and wants cuddles. How can I resist? Husband prepares packed lunch and breakfast for little ‘un, then takes her to school, all to leave me free to write. But I just stare in fascination at FaceBook. There’s a MyFlickr app! Cool; install it. Apparently apps could be the death of Facebook – people are getting cross with all the zombies and jedi vs sith silliness. I say: if you don’t want the app, Dile que no.

3. Check out all my friends blogs and post comments. Email a dear friend who’s back in touch via LinkedIn. Check my favourite writer’s websites. Read short stories on fiction website. Finally shower, dress and look at the chunk of writing I have to do today. It’s a foot chase through Old Havana. Rooftops will feature, because hey, it’s Havana! So will the Malecon, because, well, IT’S HAVANA.

4. Read some of Alejo Carpentier’s ‘The Chase’ to get in the mood. Browse my photos from Cuba, to get in the mood. (There aren’t enough of rooftops. I looked down over rootops every day in Havana – what was wrong with me – why didn’t I take more of rooftops?) Watch the rooftop party scene from Habana Blues, to get in the mood.

5. Finally in the mood, write the Old Havana chase scene; 800 words. That’ll do – half a chapter and I left at a good place – the rooftop chase begins.

6. Pick up littlest daughter from school, acquire 3-year old neighbour boy on the way. Pick apples from our tree. Bake a pie together. Make pesto for tea. Experiment with a new daiquiri that uses fresh pink grapefruit juice and just a hint of coriander. (gently, gently bruise about five coriander leaves in the glass part of a shaker, add 1/2 shot freshly squeezed lime juice, 1/2 shot of gomme, 1 shot freshly squeezed pink grapefruit juice, 2 shots light rum, shake in Boston shaker with plenty ice, fine strain into a chilled martini glass.)

7. Discuss my teenager’s complex love life with her and reluctantly help her to plan a strategy with latest love interest. (It was that or talk all night long.)

8. Laundry. Who doesn’t love laundry? NOT! I read in some newspaper article that Mrs Thatcher admitted that getting the fluff out of the dryer was one of the small pleasures of her life. I try it. It’s surprisingly satisfying – comes off in three nice clean layers.

7. Eat pie whilst reading today’s 800 words. Polish. Write this blog entry.

5000 words to go, by my estimate, until I finish the first draft of ‘Jaguar’s Realm’. I planned this ending ONE YEAR ago, but last week I thought of a major tweak that has allowed me to keep the pace and drama going strong all the way through Act 3. At least that’s the plan, and that’s why I plan. Things can only get better from a strong plan.

Writing the first draft, truly, is so much fun. I even enjoyed first drafts when I had no agent and no publisher. The story is all yours then and you’re the first one to read it.

And look…only 8pm. Still time to go salsa dancing at Freuds…

But I’m too tired.

Things I have done in the past three days rather than write the next, challenging chapter of Jaguar’s Realm.

(I mean, things I’m prepared to admit to in a blog)

1. Read emails about and from staff at the school where I’m a governor. Read them again, and again and again.

2. Phone people about the school where I’m a governor.
(yes I HAD to do those things but believe me, I lingered)

3. Browse for, choose and buy salsa dancing clothes and shoes from ebay.

4. Try on said salsa dancing clothes and shoes, gloat and marvel at how finally I’ve found an outfit that works for me and how light-as-a-feather the shoes are and wonder why I haven’t invested in specialist kit for my main hobby before.

5. Jump on any email from my editor about the ms for Joshua book 1.

6. Join Facebook and spend an entire day mooching around on it, looking people up, customising my content.

7. Shop at Primark to make myself feel frugal.

8. Drag my husband out for breakfast, lunch, coffee, long walks.

9. Pester my neighbour Gabby to gossip with me; he was only trying to watch the tennis but would I let him, no.

10. Practice my reggaeton moves until my insides hurt from excess abdominal wiggling.

Don’t even think that I’m running out of stuff to do. There’s still Litopia, browsing salsa music on iTunes, reading Caitlin Moran’s column in The Times (today I found out that there’s a Facebook group called ‘I Want To Be/Have Sex With Caitlin Moran When I Grow Up’, which I won’t join because she’s actually on it herself and as you’ll know if you read this blog regular-like, Caitlin is trying to exert pressure, by remote, on Big Brother quitters like me who’ve gone cold turkey and are trying to pretend BB isn’t on this year), baking chocolate cake.

I wish I could put movies, books or TV on that list but in truth they take just too much concentration. Don’t you think that if I could concentrate that hard I’d actually tackle this chapter head-on???

That said, here’s a list of movies I’m looking forward to failing to get in to see:

Tell No One (still haven’t managed to catch it)
Harry Potter 5
Transformers
Buy It Now
The Simpsons Movie
The Bourne Ultimatum (LOVE the Bourne!)

I was delighted to see today on Flickr that someone favourited this photo. My husband David snapped this from a Viazul tourist bus as we crossed Cuba. He kindly took lots of photos of what you see of Cuba as you cross from West to East; Havana to Santiago de Cuba. This was so that when I came to write the relevant sections of Project Jaguar, I would be able to recall the images and atmosphere of this country.

Maybe I was asleep or watching the movie because I didn’t actually witness this scene myself so I’m even more grateful that he caught it. This captures the essence of how tough it is for Cubans to travel around in Cuba. Most people in Havana that we spoke to had never been to the other side of the island. And people in Santiago would tell us, “I went to Havana once, about twenty years ago.” (It’s not like in the UK where people are too busy going to Mallorca to go to London – they can’t go anywhere – it costs too much!)

Few people own a car, those who do tend to own cars that are too clapped out to get far without breaking down and of course there’s nothing like the RAC if you do. On the major roads you find small crowds of hitchhikers gathered under bridges, despondently waving money bills at passing private cars but mainly goods lorries. There’s no such thing as a free ride.

These hitchhikers aren’t game young students; ther are people of all ages, often with small children in tow.

I wonder where this woman in the photo is going with her two little ones. Waiting for a freight train to give her a lift? I wonder how long it took to get there.